Today I released a NuGet package for Experience Manager and DD4T (.NET). It allows a developer to easily add the required MarkUp to his (View)Models to enable the inline editing features of the Experience Manager from SDL Tridion. Only use this package if you use the DD4T .NET framework!

Install the package using the package explorer:

Install-Package DD4T.XPM

The installer automatically adds 2 files to the root of your MVC WebApplication: SiteEdit_config.xml and RegionConfiguration.xml
It also updates the web.config in the ‘Views’ folder to use the DD4T.XPM.XpmWebViewPage as pageBaseType and includes
the DD4T.XPM.HtmlHelpers namespace. After installing the package it’s recommended to restart Visual Studio.

How to use

1) Decorate your Models with the XPM Attributes:

2) Create your model and call the ‘MakeInlineEditable’ method

3) Use the DD4T.XPM helpers to write out the value in the View

That’s all.

Regions

Regions are configured in the file ‘RegionConfiguration.xml’ in the root of your webapplication. This file is added by the NuGet installer. In your view you can use the following call to writeout the region MarkUp:

@XPM.RegionMarkup("PageHeader")

PageHeader is the ID of the region as configured in the RegionConfiguration.

Final notes

The NuGet installer adds the ‘SiteEdit_config.xml’ file to the root of your project. If this file is present, the XPM helper methods will write out the MarkUp (If you called ‘MakeInlineEditable’). If this file is not present, the helpers don’t output the MarkUp. Just the value. Of course you want to control the call to ‘MakeInlineEditable’ based on the environment you’re in: only call this in staging!

This package is developed with .NET 4.5.1 and NuGet version 2.7. I did *not* test it with other .NET frameworks, but I assume it just works.

DD4T stands for Dynamic Delivery For Tridion and is a leightweight ASP.NET MVC framework build on top of the SDL Tridion stack. It’s opensource and you can find more about it here

XPM is the WYSIWYG editor (and much more!) that ships with SDL Tridion.

Domain Driven Development is… well, Wikipedia explains it better than I can, so check it out!

I am a big fan of the MVC framework from Microsoft. No wonder I also love the DD4T framework as it makes building MVC websites with SDL Tridion a LOT easier.
One of the shining features of SDL Tridion is its recently upgraded WYSIWYG editor (Or Experience Manager) that allows editors to edit the content of the website in the context of the website itself, in the browser.
This is a great feature and makes it very easy to adjust content in a natural way.

Of course, before content editors can use the Experience Manager (XPM from now on) the SDL Tridion consultant has to pull some triggers to make this possible. All relatively easy to do.

But with DD4T it’s not so straight-forward as one would want. And especially if you are doing (a form of) Domain Driven Development, and thus are using (domain)ViewModels.

Before you read on, I highly recommend that you read Kah Tang’s article on ViewModels in DD4T first. This is how I usually implement DD4T and helps you understand the problem we are trying to solve in this post.

For example, consider the following razor View (which also renders the XPM markup):

As you can see this View uses the DD4T ‘IComponent’ as it’s ViewModel. And it is using the OOTB DD4T ‘SiteEditField’ HtmlHelper to generate the XPM markup.
While using the IComponent as a ViewModel is valid, it’s not as nice and clean as it could be. Also, the developer has to know the name of the field in Tridion and there’s no compile time checking. While it’s a valid approach, it doesn’t leverage all the advantages of the MVC framework (for example: no strongly typed views).

I always use (domain) specific ViewModel’s. Using your own, domain specific ViewModels has many advantages from which ‘separation of concerns’ and intellisense are just two of them (IMHO).
ViewModels only purpose is to display the Model in a certain way. Sometimes they are (almost) identical to your Domain Model, but a ViewModel can/must have extra properties to make displaying it possible. It results in much clear views.

Consider the following example (not rendering the XPM markup):

As you can see it’s much cleaner and easier to read then the previous View and there is also no logic (checking, etc) involved. (I also could have used an HtmlHelper to write out the tag. It’s up to you.)

But what if your customer asked you to implement XPM? You cannot use the OOTB Html helper since your ViewModel doesn’t have the properties this helper expects.
Well, there are a few options.

1. Add the ‘IComponent’ as a complex property to your ViewModel.
This would look something like this:

It still requires the developer to know the names in Tridion and it’s lacking the strongly typed advantages. (Intellisense)

2. Add the XMP MarkUp as separate properties to your ViewModel:

This already looks cleaner and has intellisense. But I don’t like the added properties to the ViewModel. It clutters the ViewModel.

I struggled with this issue for quite some time. But after trying the above mentioned approaches I wasn’t happy with the result. Although it works, it isn’t as nice, clean and intuitive (for a programmer) as it could be.

After spending much time on it I came up with an approach. This approach involved quite some coding, but it’s for a good cause right? And I liked doing it, because I’ve learned a lot of new stuff.

I wanted it to be a generic solution, so everyone using DD4T could use it. This is how it looks like:
(It’s still a work in progress!)

1. Create your ViewModel and decorate it with attributes.
Example:

As you can see there are 2 new Attributes involved.

InlineEditable

InlineEditableField

The first attribute ‘InlineEditable’ marks the class (ViewModel) as inline-editable with XPM. The second attribute marks a single field as inline-editable with XPM.

Of course this is not everything. Once you created your ViewModel, you have to make a call to a method to do the magic. Since all my ViewModel’s by default are created inside a ModelFactory (a subject for a different post), I made this functionality part of a base-class, but you can implement it any way.
This is how my (simplified) ViewModel builder looks like:

That’s all. The article is now ready for XPM. It’s not yet inline editable, but the information from Tridion is added to the class, so we can use it in our View.

Let see how our View would look like if we would make this ViewModel (inline)editable with XPM:

As you can see we have full intellisense and a nice and clean View. Of course, I simplified the example a little, but it proves a point.

The XPM Helper and it’s ‘Editable’ method write out the actual value of the property and its corresponding XPM MarkUp.
There’s also a ‘MarkUp’ method that just write’s out the XPM MarkUp. This becomes handy when you want to make an image or hyperlink inline-editable:

All this is not yet part of DD4T, but I am planning on integrating it in the framework, as I see it as a valuable addition. (If not: let me know).
It encourages the use of (domain)ViewModel’s and results in a cleaner solution.

If you want to the XPM helper in you project now, drop me an email and I will send you the source-code and the instructions on how to set it up. In the end there’s really not much to it, but isn’t that the case with all challenges?

In the past week I had the opportunity to install the Experience Manager with Session Preview on a completelyDD4T and SDL Tridion driven website. Configuring the Experience Manager can be quite painful. Especially if you don’t know how Session Preview (exactly) works and if you have no clue where to start and where to look.

In this post I want to give you some hooks and pointers on where to look if things get interesting 🙂
In fact, if you are DESPERATE about why your Session Preview isn’t working, this post is aimed at you!

But first: thanks to Andrew Marchuk, Daniel and Likhan from SDL Tridion for helping me. Without their help I would still be staring at my screen 🙂

First, turn of caching for your website. Just to be sure. After you got Session Preview working, turn on caching again and see what happens. But for troubleshooting the Session Preview I recommend to turn of caching completely. Just to be sure…

1. Do a basic sanity check and check the following for your staging website:

– Open the cd_storage_conf.xml from your staging website and ensure that:

Again: this module is NOT, I repeat NOT necessary if your website is a completely dynamic website. (e.g. retrieves everything from the broker like DD4T). If you still use this module, you will see that clicking on ‘Update Preview’ will generate files on the filesystem! And it will not show you the updated preview!

Open the cd_ambient_conf.xml file of your Staging website and check if the following Cartridge is referenced:

<Cartridge File="cd_webservice_preview_cartridge.xml"/>

2. Check the following for your OData Webservice: (The one that is used by the Session Preview, so the one you configured as the ‘Content Delivery Endpoint Url’ on your Publication Target)

Copy/paste this ‘Content Delivery Endpoint Url’ and paste it into your browser. (Of course inside the company domain…) and see if it responds.

The url looks like this: http://localhost:73/odata.svc/
You should get a response with a listing of all collections that can be retrieved by this OData endpoint. Something along the lines of this:

Now, do an IISReset on your website and for your OData webservice. This makes sure that your changes to the various configuration files are used when the Content Delivery Instance boots up the first time. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! In case you are still in doubt: DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! (Sorry for shouting)

Now, hit ‘Update Preview’ again. If it is still not working for whatever reason keep reading:

1. Open the logback.xml file of your Staging website, and set the loglevel to ‘VERBOSE’.
2. Open the logback.xml file of your OData webservice and set the loglevel to ‘VERBOSE’.
3. Clear both logfiles! (So you have a fresh start)
4. Clear the ‘Tridion’, ‘Tridion Content Manager’ and ‘Application’ Windows Eventlogs on the Content Manager Server
5. Clear the ‘Application’ Windows Eventlog on the Staging WebSite server
6. Clear the ‘Application’ Windows Eventlog on the Odata webservice server

Do an IISReset (You edited the logback.xml file, so this is necessary!)

Now, hit ‘Update Preview’ again and check out the logfiles in this order:

cd_core.log of your Staging website
-> Anything unusual? Especially error’s and warnings with regard to the Ambient Data Framework are important! Take them seriously and double check the cd_ambient_conf.xml and the cd_storage_conf.xml of your staging Website. Also, check if all HttpModules and/filters are present in the Web.config of your website! (See above)

cd_core.log of your OData website. If this file is (almost) empty that means that the ‘Update Preview’ request NEVER reached the OData webservice. This could be due to:
– Network issues: are the IIS Bindings of the OData webservice correct?
– Can you connect to the OData webservice using your browser?
– Is your publication target pointing to the correct Content Delivery Endpoint Url (your OData webservice)?

If there is data in the cd_core.log of your OData webservice, check to see if there are error’s or unusual statements.

If you search for your adjusted content do you see it? If so, this means that your changed content is correctly send to the OData webservice. If not, that means that your staging website cannot connect to the OData webservice. Again: Check IIS settings and network settings.

Open the Session Preview Database using SQL Server Management Studio, and open the table ‘Component Presentations’. After you hit ‘Update Preview’, you SHOULD see something added to this table. If not: check if you referenced the correct Session Preview Broker Database in BOTH of your Wrappers. (In the cd_storage_conf.xml of your Website and in the cd_storage_conf.xml of your OData webservice!)

If you see an HTTP error 400 BAD REQUEST after you click on ‘Update Preview’ check the following:

Open the Windows EventLog ‘Tridion Content Manager’ on the Content Manager server and check if you see the same error here.

If so, try the following:

Stop the TcmServiceHost windows service on the Content Manager Server. (Be careful, The SDL Tridion Content Manager stops working now!)
Next, browse to the SDL Tridion install directory\bin with the command prompt and start the TcmServiceHost.exe with the -debug command. Like this:

TcmServiceHost.exe -debug

Now, open Fiddler on the Content Manager server, apply a filter to show only traffic from the TcmServiceHost and hit ‘Update Preview’ again. Now you have the request and you can inspect it to see if there’s anything unusual. E.g. the Content-Lenght is 0. That’s weird, because that means no data was send!

The last resort consist of tracing everything related to the OData webservice. If everything above failed, do the following:

Open the Web.config of the OData webservice and add the following code:

Note that ‘maxReceivedMessageSize’ and ‘maxBufferSize’ should be the same!

Don’t forget to remove this settings once you resolved all your issues!

Phew! I *really* hope your Session Preview service is now working properly.
If this isn’t the case consider asking it on StackOverflow (and while you’re there, consider committing to the SDL Tridion Exchange Proposal)
The community is really helpful and very knowledgeable. Of course you can also open a support ticket with Customer Support.

In a website build with DD4T (almost) all content comes from the Broker Database. The content is stored as an XML string in the database and is transformed (de-serialized) into .NET objects at request time. As you can image this has a huge impact on the performance of your website: on every request the XML is loaded (streamed) from the database and the DD4T framework de-serializes this into usable .NET objects.
This is a time-consuming process and puts a heavy load on your webserver.

Luckily there are a few options/strategies to improve the performance of your website. And the beauty about these options is that they (almost) come for free!

Output Caching

The first option is the out-of-the-box Output caching from ASP.NET.
Just decorate your controller (PageController, ComponentController; your choice) with the OutputCache attribute and your done!

OutputCache caches the output (…) for the duration you configured in the web.config. If the cache duration is set to 5 minutes, and in these 5 minutes you publish a page, the changes are NOT reflected in your browser if you hit F5. Only after 5 minutes the cache is invalided and on the next request the XML is loaded from the Broker Database. And de-serialized.

DD4T Caching

Luckily for us DD4T ships with a build in cache mechanism. This caching-mechanism is build on top of the .NET System Runtime Cache and can be used in conjunction with the Output Cache.

DD4T caching stores de-serialized objects like Components and Pages in the .NET Runtime cache after they are requested for the first time. Every consecutive request for that page/component loads it from the Object cache instead of loading it from the Broker database and de-serializing it into a .NET objects.
As you can imagine, this causes a massive performance improvement.

But how does DD4T ‘know’ when to invalidate the item in the cache? Because if you re-publish a page or component, you want your website to show the updated page/component.
The fact is that DD4T never knows when an item is republished, unless it ‘asks’ SDL Tridion for it. (Due to the fact that a website is stateless)
Well, this ‘asking’ is implemented in DD4T.

DD4T poll’s every x seconds/minutes/hours/etc (configurable) if the LastPublishDate from an item in the cache has changed. If it has changed (the item was republished) it will invalidate this item. The next time this item is requested, it will be loaded from the Broker databases, de-serialized and stored in the cache.

To configure how often DD4T needs to check the LastPublishDate of the items in the cache, use this setting in your web.config (value must be in seconds)

<add key="CacheSettings_CallBackInterval" value="30"/>

In this example, DD4T poll’s the Broker Database every 30 seconds to check if the items in the cache are still valid.

Also, after a configurable amount of time, the item is -no matter what- invalidated. The amount of time can be configured separately for pages and components.
Use the following configuration settings to accomplish this:

In this example all the pages and components in the cache are invalidated after 1 hour.

SDL Tridion Object cache

SDL Tridion comes with a caching solution called ‘Object cache’. To quote the documentation, this is what it does:

To improve the performance of your Web site, you can choose to store the most commonly used or resource-intensive objects from your Content Data Store in a cache. The cache keeps these objects available for the applications that request them, rather than reinitializing them each time they are requested.

Pretty obvious right? So no need to explain it further.
Read the documentation here. (Login required)

In my previous post I discussed how to get started with ASP.NET MVC3 and Tridion using the opensource DD4T framework.
In this post I want to show you how DD4T handles the rendering of ComponentPresentations on a page.

In my previous example, the whole HTML of the (Tridion)page was rendered by only 1 (razor)view. This is not a desired scenario, because it leads to big views and re-use is almost impossible.
Tridion handles this quite nicely by using Component Templates. These templates are responsible for rendering their own little piece of content. And this is exactly what you want in your webapplication.

So, how to implement this using the DD4T framework? Lets find out by creating a simple page.

First, create a page in Tridion with 2 (or more) ComponentPresentations and publish the page. (Make sure your Component Templates are DD4T templates and have a metadatafield called ‘view’ with the name of an existing view in it!. See my previous post on how to create a DD4T Component/Page Template)

DD4T needs to know which (default) Controller to use. This needs to be configured in your Web.config. Add the following 2 lines of code in your Web.config:

Next, we have to write some code to handle the rendering of the ComponentPresentations.
1. Create a new controller and name it ‘TridionComponentController’.
2. Add the following code in this controller:

This controller is used to render each ComponentPresentation on a page. The TridionControllerBase class reads the metadata from each ComponentPresentation to find out which razorview to use. The result of the Action-method is a rendered componentpresentation.

Now, create a folder ‘TridionComponent’ in the ‘Views’ folder, and create a new razoriew. Give this view the same name as you defined in the metadata of your ComponentTemplate. So, in my case that is ‘Article’.
Add your HTML to this new View. My Article view looks like this:

Now we have to adjust our main view to NOT render the ComponentPresentations inline, but to use our new controller and the DD4T ‘ComponentPresentation’ Action method.
Open your Page view (In the folder TridionPage, General.cshtml) and add the following code:

Notice the @Html.RenderComponentPresentations()? This is a HTML helper from the DD4T framework that renders all the componentpresentations on the page, using our newly created ‘TridionComponentController’.

This ‘RenderComponentPresentation’ HTML helper renders ALL the ComponentPresentations, but often you only want to render certain ComponentPresentations. For instance, you want to render ‘Banner’ components in another section on your page then your ‘Article’ elements.
This can be achieved by using one of the overloads from the ‘RenderComponentPresentations’ HTML helper.

To only render ComponentPresentations that are based on a certain schema, you can use this code:

@Html.RenderComponentPresentationsBySchema("ArticleSchema")

To render ComponentPresentations based on a certain ComponentTemlate, you can use this code:

@Html.RenderComponentPresentationsByView("Article")

Or, if you want to render ComponentPresentations based on multiple ComponentTemplates, you can use this code:

Introduction

In this post I am going to explain how to set up and use the Dynamic Delivery For Tridion Framework. If you haven’t heared of this framework check out this site: http://code.google.com/p/dynamic-delivery-4-tridion/
In short: Dynamic Delivery For Tridion (DD4T) is an ASP.NET MVC3 framework specifically designed to build a web(site) application using SDL Tridion.

Getting started

The sources contain the Java version and the .NET MVC3 version of the project. We are only interested in the .NET MVC3 version of the framework.

Template Building Blocks

First, we have to upload the Template Building Blocks to the Tridion Content Management Server.
Check out this WIKI page on how to upload the templates

Component Templates and Page Templates

Once you uploaded the Template Building Blocks, you can use these to create Page- and Component Templates. To create a Component Template, open up the Templatebuilder tool and create a new Component Template. Drag and drop the following (DD4T) Building Blocks on your template:

Generate dynamic component

Publish binaries for component

Also, create a Page Template with the following (DD4T) Building Blocks:

Generate dynamic page

Publish binaries for page

Next, create a simple meta-data schema with one single line text (Preferably it’s a selectlist with values from a category) for usage on the newly created Component- and Page Template.
This schema allows you to tell the DD4T framework which View (visual representation, ASP.NET MVC3 Razor template) to use when this Page/Component is rendered in the browser.
Xml name of the field should be ‘view’.

Component Template for Articles, using the View ‘Article’:

Do the same for the Page Template: Give it a metadata-schema, with one field called ‘view’ and insert which view to use in the framework:

Visual Studio Projects setup

Open up Visual Studio and create new project of type ‘ASP.NET MVC3 Web Application’ (Make sure you are using the Razor view engine)

Next, we are going to add some projects (dll’s) from the just downloaded DD4T framework. Choose from the ‘File’ menu for ‘Add’ -> ‘Existing Project’. Add the following DD4T projects to your solution:

DD4T.ContentModel

DD4T.ContentModel.Contracts

DD4T.Factories

DD4T.Mvc

DD4T.Providers.SDLTridion2011 (Or DD4T.Providers.SDLTridion2009 if you are using SDL Tridion 2009)

Your solution looks something like this:
Remark: in a real life application you don’t want hard references to all these dlls. You want to load the dependencies by means of Dependency Injection (Unity, MEF, etc)
Next, we have to copy some Tridion dll’s into the following folder: %DD4T Install Path%\dependencies\Tridion 2011 DLLs. In here you find a file called ‘Missing files’. Read it, and copy-paste all the Tridion Dll’s into this folder.
Now, add all the DD4T projects as a reference to your MvcApplication. Your solution should build fine now.

The DD4T framework uses the web.config to find out from which publication to request content. Add the following 2 keys to the web.config. (Of course, fill in your publication id)
<add key="Site.ActiveWebsite" value="Corporate.En"/>
<add key="WebSite.Corporate.En.PublicationId" value="7"/>

Writing *some* code

Now we have added all the necessary framework parts, it’s time to wire up our first controller so we can view our page in the browser. Luckily for us, the DD4T framework has already done a lot for us. Al we have to do is to use the right methods and classes!
If you aren’t familiar with the .NET MVC pattern, this is roughly how it looks like:

Url is typed into the browser

Request is fired to the webserver and our webapplication. It goes through a ‘rout-engine’ (Global.asax) to find out what to do with this url (request)

This route-engine looks at the url and based on the parts of the url it sends it to a controller

The controller builds up the Model and passes this model on to the View

The (razor)View renders the HTML and pushes the output back to the browser

First step is adding a rule to the Global.asax that makes sure that (for now) all requests are handled by the same controller. Add the following code to the ‘RegisterRoutes’ method from the Global.asax:

This makes sure that every request is passed on to the TridionPageController.

Time to make the TridionPageController! Go to your MvcApplication and create a new controller. Right click on the ‘Controller’ folder in the solution explorer and choose ‘Add’-> ‘Controller’.
Name it: TridionPageController

By default all controllers from ASP.NET MVC inherit from the Microsoft Controller class. We don’t want this. We want to inherit from the TridionControllerBase class from the DD4T.Mvc project.
Make sure your TridionPageController inherits from the TridionControllerBase:

Remark about the above code: The factories and providers are created here for simplicity. In a real world scenario you don’t want to do this, but you want to load the Factories and Providers by means of Dependency Injection (Unity, MEF, etc). But for now it’s ok.

The TridionControllerBase defines a set of useful methods. We want our controller to look up the page (url) we requested in the browser from the Tridion Broker Database. Normally you would write code, using the Tridion dll’s to retrieve the Pagecontent from the Tridion Broker Database yourself, but the DD4T framework has already done this for us.

This method retrieves the PageContent from the Tridion Broker Database by finding the Page by it’s Url (pageId = Url). So, make sure you published a page to the Tridion Broker Database using the DD4T Templates!

The View

The ‘Page’ method returns *something*, but we have to define of course how that ‘something’ needs to be visualed. In other words: we need to create a (razor) view.
ASP.NET MVC3 uses a pattern to find the right View to visualize this page and it uses (among others) the name of the Controller to find the view. So, in the ‘Views’ folder, create a new folder
‘TridionPage’. In here we have to define the View. Remeber the metadata schema we made for Component- and Page Templates? Well, your Pagetemplate has this metadata on it, and you gave it a meaningfull name. I named mine ‘General’. So I have to create a view named ‘General’. Here is how my folder structure looks like:

Views contain the HTML. Here we define how our page looks like. One of the advantages of the DD4T Framwork is, that you can have strongly typed views. This means that you tell your View that he (she) needs to render HTML for object of type IPage or IComponent or String (not very usefull) or MyArticleObject, etc. This gives you full intellisense when writing your View.

Your view needs to render the HTML for an IPage object. (IPage object comes from the DD4T Framework).
Add the following code to your view:

ASP.NET automatically wires up the properties from the IPage to the ‘Model’ keyword because we told this View that he (she) is destined to render HTML for an IPage object. (The ‘@model IPage’ directive).

And now: RUN! (F5)
Make sure you are requesting an Url that is published to the Tridion Broker Database 🙂

I hope this gives you enough information to get started with the DD4T Framework. The framework is actively developed and it is already running live in at least one big financial organisation.
So far everything runs just fine 🙂

Disclaimer:This example is provided as is and is simplified for the obvious reasons.